A Study On Principles Of English-Chinese And Chinese-English Film Title Translation From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

In current society, film has become a type of art ideal for both young and old,especially in recent years. With further development of China’s reform and opening up, the Chinese film market has stepped into prosperity gradually. In the year 2014,China has officially surpassed Japan as the second largest film market in the world,only next to the market in North America. With tremendous consumptive capacity,China has attracted numerous foreign filmmakers and publishers. More and more foreign films have been introduced into the Chinese market. Meanwhile, Chinese films are also actively seeking the way of development, going aboard to explore larger market. Due to this reason, film translation has received more attention. The quality of the translation of film titles, the part first to be known of a film, often directly determines the success or failure of a film at the box office. Thus, translation of film titles is particularly critical. A high quality film title should not only summarize essence of the film, express the theme of the film, highlight the style of the film, but also have high aesthetic and artistic value, so as to arouse the audience’s curiosity and interest. Therefore, in the process of film title translation, different factors should be taken into consideration undoubtedly, to make it adapt to the target language countries’ film market.In the thesis, Eugene A. Nida’ functional equivalence, as a theoretical support, is applied for the study from three aspects: the features, functions, and translating methods of the film title translation. With analysis of the translation of more than 600 film titles, the research has rich examples to support the author’s statements in the thesis. The translation theory of functional equivalence proposed by Nida, emphaszes readers’ feeling, requiring the translation to convey the spirit of the original style, and produce the same response as the source text. This is no doubt consistent with some of the characteristics of film titles. The author adopts the theory to guide this study.The whole thesis starts with three main aspects: the features, functions, and translating methods of film titles, and then elaborates them one by one. In this thesis,the integration of theory and translation cases has been adopted. Analysis of individual features of language, culture and informative, aesthetic, vocative,expressive functions, with different and appropriate examples, are conducted in the thesis. The purpose is to find out the similarities and differences of translation methods adopted to translate different film categories.However, the ultimate aim is that the translated film titles will bring the same reaction and perception to the target language audiences as the original ones and stay equally attractive for the target language audiences to choose the films, so that the films may achieve good results in the film markets and realize communication between different languages, cultures and arts meanwhile.